granfalloon

Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

n. A group of two or more people who imagine or are manipulated to believe they share a connection based on some circumstance of little or no real significance.

Etymologies

Coined by Kurt Vonnegut in the 1963 science fiction novel, Cat's Cradle, in which Vonnegut described the term as referencing a false karass, or "a proud and meaningless association of human beings"; later adopted by market researchers and social scientists (Wiktionary)

Examples

The karass is that group of friends from college who have helped one another's careers in a hundred subtle ways over the years; the granfalloon is the marketing department at your firm, where everyone has a meticulously defined place on the org chart but nothing ever gets done.

The social cohesion promoted by paying taxes to and receiving benefit checks from the same government agency as millions of other strangers is spurious, however — an example of the "granfalloon," Kurt Vonnegut's term for

At first I thought it was a version of the granfalloon, the term Kurt Vonnegut invented to describe a striking but meaningless encounter: my brother-in-law, Jim Rasenberger and I both have books coming out within two weeks of each other.

Hazel's obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon.

Another, widely used in selling many types of product, is to foster the idea that consumers belong to an elite in-group, a granfalloon (a term coined by Kurt Vonnegut for "a proud and meaningless association of human beings" based on a shared characteristic).